Making Gideros free and open source

ArtLeeApps

As long as there are people supporting it and developing it, ill be hanging around, i like how easy the code is.

Look at other open source stuff like Java plugins, redhat linux... etc. you end up have lots of code options you can play with (some good.. some not so good.).

Just hope the experts here hang around

jdbc

These are good news for developers.

For example Gideros could add HTML5 with emscripten and the community help, or you could fix some minor problem, even change some basic classes with other native C++ code.

Open source is great and you can make also money with it.

I was analyzing Gideros and Moai for helping to develop my games. I used Gideros because of less learning curve. So now they are no excuses, Gideros win.

keszegh

This is indeed bad news and good news. I hope it will turn out to be the best for gideros.

Probably I won't be able to say anything new about how to finance the future of Gideros, yet let me say my thoughts. I think open-source could lead to different incomes as ar2rsawseen mentioned, many companies like to invest into open-source. if you find the right partners, this could in fact help gideros to survive and develop faster. perhaps google summer of codes can fund some bigger subprojects (adding new export options, etc.).

as i've been following openfl/haxe, i've seen that they went through slightly similar phases recently, although it was open-source always, in december they were still selling some plugins for money. then they changed this, now everything is for free, and i think that gives the most courage to developers to choose a framework. so in fact i would open-source every labs thing you have, but monetizing is of course also a possibility, you can try it in short-term, but i think if you choose to go the open-source way you should do it completely and whole-heartedly (pretending that mainly you open-sourced it because you find this optimal for everybody, not advertising too much the unhappy aspects behind your decision).

perhaps there should be a recommended donation for each of the labs codes if you use it in a project. of course professional support could also be a source of income. Also openfl, blender etc. has an option when you can monthly give them some money. E.g. I cannot allow to buy a full gideros licence, not yet, but giving smaller amount of money (regularly or just occasionally) would be more of an option for more people. also that makes it easy to invest into gideros as much as you can and want.

More about investors, again on the haxe page prezi and others are listed, i can imagine that prezi would be interested, talk to them. also, they added tizen support recently to openfl and i'm pretty sure that was heavily supported by samsung et al. gideros could also add tizen support the same way.

i have my personal concerns about roadmap changes and in particular pc/mac export, i will ask about this in another post.

Tom2012

I'm a bit worried about this announcement. Mainly because I have no idea what open source is all about, or how it will pan out.

Hopefully things will go well and good luck to Gideros. It's just so much better than the other things on the market!

keszegh

so about desktop export.

when i started with gideros it always felt like desktop support. it's coming in the future months. perhaps i was misled by my own wishful thinking. yet my app is not a game and i have loong time plans with it, and i invested many hours in it, so rewriting to another sdk is not really an option. but i definitely need desktop export. so i'm quite concerned with the future of gideros and especially this feature.

@atilim, i assume during the months of (mostly) silence you were working on 2.0 and desktop export, perhaps with open-source better communication is possible, you don't have to worry that much about disappointments of clients any more. so please, can you tell us in which stage are these projects? (2.0 and desktop export)
i really hope that you plan to add these in spite of change of plans.
let me know how can i/we help.

btw gideros is easy to work with and is quite complete already, so it's current features are enough for making good 2d mobile games. if my projects would be games i would not even worry at all with the current news. (although perhaps ios etc. changes can force you to update gideros so that it works with newer versions of android/ios).

john26

> so please, can you tell us in which stage are these projects? (2.0 and desktop export)

Yes, and please also tell us about WP8 progress...

@keszegh. You could try my open source Longford SDK for desktop:
http://giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/4469/introducing-longford-a-partly-gideros-compatible-open-source-game-engine

keszegh

@john26, longford seems to be a very nice project, and a proof of concept for desktop export.
but i need all features of gideros, so currently longford is not an option. e.g. i use meshes heavily, as far as i remember longford does not support them yet.

i hope that desktop export will be done by @atilim and others (now even you and the longford code could be involved).

totebo

Holy moly, how did I miss this bombshell!?

Judging by the activity in this thread it's good news. I will of course continue to make games with Gideros. For me it's either Gideros or Unity. And Unity is a difficult beast for a "creative developer" like me coming from a Flash background.

Are the milestones in this transition known or predicted?

Niclas

john26

@keszegh, yes, you are right, Longford does not support meshes. I will look into adding them... It will be interesting to see what will happen when Gideros code is released. I will consider the feasibility of contributing as well of course. Much depends on how Gideros code is structured, how many comments and documentation there are. Its possible I will not be able to understand the code well enough to make changes. At least with Longford I know where everything goes!

keszegh

@john26, meshes is just one thing i use, who knows what else. in any case before you work more on longford, better to wait for the gideros source code release and see how it looks like, etc. (and my hope is that desktop support is already in the process at least).

keszegh

about above mentioned ways of donation consider this:
http://www.patreon.com/

MikeHart

How much longer till the sources are available? Are we talking months, years?

keszegh

How much longer till the sources are available? Are we talking months, years?

Indeed more info/transparency about plans would be good (answers to our questions in this topic e.g.). if anything, this is something that could be better, now that business structure is about to change.

ar2rsawseen

Honestly @atilim is a little carried away and started redoing lots of stuff, last time I heard there was an awesome redoing to player manipulation

let me check with him, where is he now in terms of code

MikeHart

If you want the community to get involved somehow, you guys need to stay focused.

marcelojunior

Above all, my congratulations for the excellent work in the creation of Gideros.

keszegh

Honestly @atilim is a little carried away and started redoing lots of stuff, last time I heard there was an awesome redoing to player manipulation

let me check with him, where is he now in terms of code

all these make me quite excited, but I agree with @MikeHart that it would be more useful to stay focused and add (and release!) features one-by-one.

keszegh

although i hope this means a full-screen desktop player...

OZApps

In some ways I would tend to agree with Mike, where there was no communication a couple of days more wouldn't have changed things, but then after announcing that Gideros is going OpenSource and not having a timeline on the source is causing the anxiety that is seen.

@ar2rsawseen, I understand that releasing code to the wild (away from the developers machine) needs a massive overhaul and clean up and @Atilim also needs to pay his bills like everybody else and could have other priorities. It would help to as many have suggested have a roadmap of releases, so it could first be the IDE, then the player, then the engine (in whichever order)

let's hope that communication does not become the issue.

aditya

The only drawback of gideros from my perspective was/is the inability to publish for the windows phones. That being said, a roadmap would help.

jalmince

I have been using the free version for 5 months and now that my apps is really taking shape, I was planning to by the indie license. what shoud I do ? When is the open source version to be out ? Is it still possible to buy paid version ?

john26

I think @atilim should upload the code today even if it is not "finished" and even if it won't run. That is the whole point of version control and collaborative coding. You don't wait till the code is finished (it never is), you commit every day so others can see your changes. @atilim can continue to make commits after first upload, that's kind of the point of git (or whatever system is to be used).

End users should, of course, stick to binary released versions for actual development. It is understood the code on Github is not necessarily stable.

jalmince

Thanks but I' d like a stable version, and I' am happy with the current one.
Don' t want to have to update every second day from Git or wherever.
So I repeat my question : Is it still possible to buy the paid version ?
( pls if you don' t know don't answer ! )

Tom2012

Can someone explain how it would work, please?

Where would you download the latest Gideros version from? Wouldn't there be many different versions of Gideros, if it was open source?

Mells

I cross my fingers so that this situation doesn't blow up and that everyone (the dev team, the users, everyone) can take a decision that make them appeased regarding their relationship to the product.
It's true that communication is still a weak point and it would have prevented users from having their expectations unmet.

Seeing the comments I feel sorry, but I don't really know what for. The team, the (paid) users, the product, the community...

jdbc

Can someone explain how it would work, please?

Where would you download the latest Gideros version from? Wouldn't there be many different versions of Gideros, if it was open source?

I guess we will download last version of Gideros as a binary package or source code from a github repository. Anyway if you download source code from github, you can change some part of the original code, if you want or you know of course. From source code, you can also build your own Gideros binary.

I am really interested to know how Android and iOS call Gideros lua code. I have read some articles about running Lua and Python code on Android and iOS, a quite interesting subject.

Bill5567

I hope it works as open source, the alternative 'Corona' is too expensive. The indie license for that is useless, and the pro is too much. I guess it might be time to learn swift!

HubertRonald

wow... I hope this change works, because I think Gideros is a good product

lessmsios

Was curious - was the Gideros code built on a Mac or Windows or Linux platform?

I was a paid subscriber but the growth was a bit slow for my needs. This could be a huge potential to developers to sell powerful components/plugins that developers using Corona have been begging for yet never received.

The original creators should not throw away the idea of a profitable business. Many developers are willing to pay $$ for quality training books, videos, and templates for games and business.

ar2rsawseen

For now we are leaning towards using Github as main repository.

Would prefer to provide builds, and currently looking at auto build platforms, if anyone knows any good one that is free for open source projects, then give us a shout

@lessmsios each platform is build on it's own OS.
As in, you can't make a Windows build on Mac and can't make Mac build on Windows

But plugins can be cross platform (as in work on any platform) if they are in cross platform C/C++ code